Abstract
Dynamic hard shoulder running and ramp closure are two active traffic management (ATM) strategies that are used to alleviate highway traffic congestion. This study aims to evaluate the effects of these two strategies on congested freeways under non-recurring congestion. The study’s efforts can be considered in two parts. First, we performed a detailed microsimulation analysis to quantify the potential benefits of these two ATM strategies in terms of safety, traffic operation, and environmental impact. Second, we evaluated the implementation feasibility of these two strategies. The simulation results indicated that the implementation of the hard shoulder showed a 50%–57% reduction in delay, a 41%–44% reduction in fuel consumption and emissions, and a 15%–18% increase in bottleneck throughput. By contrast, the implementation of ramp closure showed a 20%–34% decrease in travel time, a 6%–9% increase in bottleneck throughput, and an 18%–32% reduction in fuel consumption and emissions. Eventually, both strategies were found to be economically feasible.
Highlights
A considerable amount of freeway congestion is due to non-recurring events and incidents, which has encouraged significant innovation in incident management practices and techniques to minimize the impact of these unforeseen events [1,2]
The results showed that the improved model could be effectively used in hard shoulder running (HSR) optimization: the queue total travel delay decreased by 25.05%, while the throughput at the accident point increased by 59.53% [17]
The results showed that the improved model could be effectively used in HSR optimization: the queue total travel delay decreased by 25.05%, while the throughput at the accident point increased by 59.53% [16]
Summary
A considerable amount of freeway congestion is due to non-recurring events and incidents, which has encouraged significant innovation in incident management practices and techniques to minimize the impact of these unforeseen events [1,2]. Most of them have focused on freeway incidents because these facilities carry higher volumes of traffic and because of their limited access nature, which restricts drivers’ chances to detour when encountering congestion [3,4,5,6,7,8]. Managing these congestions should be done quickly and without delay, unlike what may occur when operators of TIM manually deploy operational strategies [9]. Dynamic hard shoulder running and dynamic ramp closure are considered promising strategies for freeway facilities [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]
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